“You’re very talented.”

“Once, maybe. I haven’t used that part of my brain in a long time, though.”

“Why not?”

I chewed the inside of my cheek, not ready to answer that question. I never went back to it because I just fell into something new. I’d always assumed there’d be time for it, that I could go back to my painting later. That I could balance the practical with the artistic. But family and work became all encompassing.

It wasn’t a bad life, just a life without a lot of . . . passion. Adventure. Purpose. Intrigue. Wonder . . . And paint. “Here,” I said, handing him a slippery dish. He took it, drying it off without asking anything else.

 We stood in the darkened kitchen, quietly cleaning up. It was nice, the not talking. When I finished washing up I leaned back against the counter, swallowing the last of the wine in my glass. He hummed a bit while he was working, a tune I almost recognized but not quite. His voice was even and pleasant, even humming. He caught me watching him but didn’t stop his tune, just grinned a little.

I was struck by how easy this was, how comfortable it was. There was no onion to peel here; Clark was an open book. Easy to read, easy to predict, he’d tell me anything I asked him. No holding back, no games, no bullshit.

But also maybe no chase? No working for it, no running after, no stomach pangs, no hit of adrenaline when the little things go my way. Like when Hank threw me that apple, I got a thrill from that, right?

You also got a thrill when Clark was draped across you, breathing on your thighs . . .

Well, I’m only human. And a human who is living in her own romance novel, remember? The house, the ocean, the cowboy? There’s your passion. Adventure. Purpose. Intrigue. Wonder.

“Paint?”

“What’s that?” I asked, brought out of my daydream.

“I was saying that if you wanted, I could help you paint the kitchen. When you’re ready, of course.”

The librarian finished drying the dish, still humming his merry tune.

And I thought long and hard about paint. I was still thinking about it after he went home.

Chapter ten

The next two weeks passed by quickly. I spent my days either cleaning, organizing, or driving countless bags of clothing, kitchen supplies, and ever-loving tube socks to a local shelter that was happy to take them off my hands. I found stack after stack of old plates, cups, and saucers; nothing too fancy but not cheap either. I pored over them, selecting a few pieces I wanted here and there but mostly packing them carefully into boxes and bringing those down to the shelter as well.

I threw away and recycled so much so that I now knew the names of the sanitation guys on my route. Threadbare rugs, moth-eaten coats and scarves were pitched; and bag after bag of magazines went into the recycling bin. Boxes of old receipts, calendars dating from the seventies, cassettes, CDs, VHS tapes, DVDs—pitched, recycled, or donated. The eight-tracks I donated to an antiques shop; I knew someone would pay money for those.

Encyclopedias, yellowed with age and warped from water damage under the leaky roof, and sadly with outdated information, were recycled as well. As Clark pointed out, not everything was worth saving.

Checkbooks, TV Guides, ads for local stores that had gone out of business years ago—there was no rhyme or reason to what was saved. And there was no easy way to go through this; you couldn’t just go through bulldozer style and throw everything out. I realized that when a box that I mistakenly thought contained only old coupons had one of the original titles to the land the house was sitting on! And in a box of crappy costume jewelry? An antique brooch with a ruby the size of a marble. A marble!

“A very small marble, maybe, if you squint,” Clark had said when I showed it to him.

“Oh where’s your sense of storytelling?” I’d said right back to him.

I was recounting the story to Jessica one morning when she stopped by to see how things were going. She’d helped out a few times with sorting and packing, taking a carload herself down to the shelter a couple of days a week after her shift at the restaurant.

One afternoon I made her come up with me to the attic. After the initial foray into the basement, I wasn’t too proud to admit I wanted some company; I’d seen way too many horror movies to venture into an attic alone. I promised her dibs on any creepy dolls we found up there.

The attic stairs were at the end of the hallway on the second floor, almost hidden behind the linen closet. Behind a door that you opened with a key, which had made it seem like a wonderland when I was a young girl.

Jessica and I opened the door with a loud creak. The stairs were as steep as I remembered, and creaky, just like attic stairs should be. Turning on a small landing, once you made it around that corner you could see how large it was. The house was truly grand, and it had an attic to match.

Spanning the length of the house, it had the widest plank floors I’d ever seen anywhere, and I’m from Pennsylvania, home of the wide plank. But this was the great wild north of California, and the timber that was milled back then was staggeringly huge. As we crept, quiet as little mice up the last few steps, I saw what I remembered more vividly than almost anything else from my childhood.

I saw miles and miles of unobstructed deep blue ocean. Window after window set into the back of the house, eight panes wide and equally as tall. An attic had no earthly reason to have this many windows, it was a waste of heat and space. But it didn’t matter. Because the man who designed this home knew how important and how utterly unique a view of this magnitude would be. And thank goodness the subsequent generations felt the same way, as it was never walled over.

“Would you look at that,” Jessica breathed behind me.

“It’s stunning isn’t it?” I said quietly. Who knows how long it had been since someone had been up here? The dust motes dancing in the air current we’d stirred up indicated that Aunt Maude hadn’t used this space recently. And it was untouched by the pack rat stacks of crap that had taken over the rest of the house. It was still the attic from my childhood.

Dress mannequins were lined against one wall, like girls at a party waiting to be asked to dance. Some were wearing party dresses that had never been finished, and even after years of the sunlight fading them, the attic was filled with splashes of sugary pink, buttercup yellow, azure blue, kelly green, and ruby red. Sequins, bows, prints, and swirls waited to twirl.

On the other wall? Trunks, stacked four and five high. Travel stickers shellacked the sides with places I’d never heard of as a child, but sounded so exotic. Athens. Siam. Mexico City. Cleveland. Some of the trunks were empty, but others contained treasures. Old hats and gloves for playing dress-up, old-fashioned clunky cameras for pretending to take pictures while playing dress-up. Maps. Letters. Yearbooks full of people who had lived and cried and had babies and died, all before I was even born.